Deseret Morning News, Thursday, August 18, 2005

Experts want Utah kids to 'lighten up'

Delta Center forum seeks ways to fight 'major threat'

By Lois M. Collins
Deseret Morning News

Poor food choices, too much television and not enough activity are super-sizing Utah children.

Deseret Morning News graphic

And with the increased and unwanted weight gain comes health risks such as heart disease, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer.

One in four Utah children is at an unhealthy weight. The number of children in the state who weigh more than they should is enough to fill 2,067 classrooms, according to Dr. David Sundwall, director of the Utah Department of Health.

What to do about it is a question that brought experts and policymakers from education, health care, public health, community planning, major companies and community organizations together for a daylong childhood obesity forum Wednesday at the Delta Center, sponsored by the state health department.

The incredible increase in weight in children and adults is a "major threat" both to the welfare of those who are overweight or at risk and to the future of the health-care system, which will have to find resources to treat the ills that result, said keynote speaker Dr. William Dietz, director of the Division of Nutrition and Physical Activity in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Dietz ticked off concerns: One in three children born in 2000 will develop diabetes at some point. Doctors are regularly seeing in youngsters type 2 diabetes, formerly called "adult onset" because it almost never appeared in children. And where it takes about 15 years for kidney complications to develop — less of a crisis in a 65-year-old who develops diabetes — it's a life-altering event for someone who has diabetes at 15 and experiences kidney failure at 30, he said.

Still, there are fairly simple steps that families can take to combat the risk of their children becoming overweight, or to reverse it.

He said that breast-feeding is a first step to prevent excess weight gain, although it's not clear why. Theories include the fact that a baby stops eating when he's full, while bottle-feeding parents look to the bottle itself to gauge satiety.

Reducing television, video games and other sedentary activities is a big step, Dietz said. Parents may fear children will see sex or violence; they don't pay attention to all the messages about food, which can also affect their children's future. And watching TV is a lump-in-a-chair activity.

The TV should never be allowed in children's bedrooms, he emphasized.

They should also all eat dinner together as a family, added Dr. Mark Templeman, a Salt Lake pediatrician. That's a good way of sharing the day and for setting healthy eating habits. But Dietz noted that half of Americans have their dinner in front of the TV. "They should be sharing events; that should be sanctified family time," he said.

As for what a child eats, it needn't be a war zone. Parents should control the food that children are offered and let the child worry about how much he wants. A hungry child will eat. But overeating is a major problem in the United States. Parents should offer more fruits and vegetables, reduce soft drink and juice consumption (adolescents get 13 percent of their calories from those drinks), he said. And having dessert shouldn't be contingent on cleaning the plate.

Communities — whether neighborhoods or workplaces — should make walking and physical activity enticing.

Schools need to control what's in the vending machines. Dietz noted that even in schools that have become dependent on the money from junk food, there are ways to make it work, like providing healthful alternatives and promoting them. He said some schools charge more for less healthy foods and use that to subsidize the cost of the things that are healthier, so their prices stay low.

And schools have also saved money and increased good eating habits by raising fruits and vegetables that can be consumed on campus, Dietz said, such as an "edible schoolyard" in Berkeley, Calif.

Participants also heard from local experts on what families, schools, communities, health- care providers and the media can do to conquer childhood obesity.